Thursday, February 23, 2017

KNOWING WHICH PODCASTS ARE THE MOST POPULAR DEPENDS ON WHO YOU BELIEVE

Last Friday we
featured Podtrac’s PODCAST PUBLISHERS
AUDIENCE RANKINGS, one of two monthly charts of top podcasts provided by
the company.In that post we talked
about Podtrac’s goal of becoming
the go-to provider for podcast metrics, something the industry needs. Podtrac
founder and CEO Mark Mccrey replied to our questions but his response left some
SPARK! readers wondered about the veracity of the Podtrac data.

click to enlarge

We heard from
several producers and a couple of distributors who were surprised when Mccrey
told us that counts can change up
or down by 20% from month to month.

“That's
a helluva margin of error!” one observer said.

(The January 2017
Podtrac top 20 podcasts, ranked by US Unique Monthly Audience, is on the
right.)

It turns out we
aren’t the only observer to bring up questions about Podtrac’s data.

For instance the top podcast chart contains
no metrics.It is just a list of
podcasts without any stats to back it up.

Podtrac
doesn’t provide any proof about how the Unique Monthly Audience sizes compare with each other.

We repeatedly asked
for more information from Mccery but he never responded to our questions.

One observer told me: “Podtrac’s
rankings are specious at best. Their charts look good but they are filled with
aspirational notions, not factual data.”

So, are any of the other
top podcast charts that are more reliable?

To get the lay of
the land we compared the most recent Podtrac Top 10 with the most recent
rankings by iTunes, Stitcher and Podcast One. To say there is a lot of
variation from company to company is an understatement.

None of the four
chart publishers reveal their actual numbers to explain why podcast #1 has a larger
audience than podcast #2.Each company
uses its own proprietary analytics and qualification criteria.

No single podcast
appears on all four of the lists. This
American Life, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio and The Joe Rogan Experience appear on three
of the four Top 10 charts.Beyond these
programs there is very little consensus about which podcasts truly are in the
Top 10. I guess you can say that measuring podcast audiences is still in
development. For now, buyer beware.